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For certain sorts of systems, programming, it's deemed essential that
all allocation failures be explicitly handled where they occur. For
example, see Linus Torvald's opinion in [1]. Merely not calling global
panic handlers, or always `try_reserving` first (for vectors), is not
deemed good enough, because the mere presence of the global OOM handlers
is burdens static analysis.
One option for these projects to use rust would just be to skip `alloc`,
rolling their own allocation abstractions. But this would, in my
opinion be a real shame. `alloc` has a few `try_*` methods already, and
we could easily have more. Features like custom allocator support also
demonstrate and existing to support diverse use-cases with the same
abstractions.
A natural way to add such a feature flag would a Cargo feature, but
there are currently uncertainties around how std library crate's Cargo
features may or not be stable, so to avoid any risk of stabilizing by
mistake we are going with a more low-level "raw cfg" token, which
cannot be interacted with via Cargo alone.
Note also that since there is no notion of "default cfg tokens" outside
of Cargo features, we have to invert the condition from
`global_oom_handling` to to `not(no_global_oom_handling)`. This breaks
the monotonicity that would be important for a Cargo feature (i.e.
turning on more features should never break compatibility), but it
doesn't matter for raw cfg tokens which are not intended to be
"constraint solved" by Cargo or anything else.
To support this use-case we create a new feature, "global-oom-handling",
on by default, and put the global OOM handler infra and everything else
it that depends on it behind it. By default, nothing is changed, but
users concerned about global handling can make sure it is disabled, and
be confident that all OOM handling is local and explicit.
For this first iteration, non-flat collections are outright disabled.
`Vec` and `String` don't yet have `try_*` allocation methods, but are
kept anyways since they can be oom-safely created "from parts", and we
hope to add those `try_` methods in the future.
[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wh_sNLoz84AUUzuqXEsYH35u=8HV3vK-jbRbJ_B-JjGrg@mail.gmail.com/
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